What: i don't look like a priest to you?I said, “Hey, why don’t we get Tuffi to do our baptism?”

“She’s not Catholic,” Victoria said.

I said, “I know, but I think of her as totally priestly.”  

Tuffi, formerly known as Stephanie, but renamed Tuffi by Tashi when Tashi was just learning to speak, is one of Tashi’s God-moms.  Tuffi presided over Tashi’s baby-naming and seemed like a total priest to me.  

Victoria said, “Someone Jewish can’t do a baptism.”

I said, “Why not?  It’s not like we can get a priest to do it.”

Victoria said, “Why not?”  

And because she is pregnant and probably experiencing a little “mommy-brain,” I gave her the benefit of the doubt.  I trusted that she was probably listening the other eight times we talked about the baptism but just forgot, so I told her again about how I met with Father Steven, in the Castro. 

About a month ago, I got this other priestly idea, which was to get the whole family baptized.  I see it like this:  I don’t want half my family to be part of something and the other half not a part of that something, even if it’s total voodoo and I don’t believe in it anyway.  I mean, just in case there’s any power there, I might as well get some of it.  Doesn’t matter to me whose God is providing it.  There’s only one God anyway, we all know that.  And since Tashi and I have not been baptized, I made an appointment with a priest to ask some questions.  I was in San Francisco and thought if there is ever going to be a like-minded priest, a priest in the gayest neighborhood in America is MY priest. 

First thing he said to me, “So you want to become Catholic.” 

I was like, “No, no, no.  I just want to be baptized.” 

Father Steven said that no priest would perform a baptism on somebody if that somebody wasn’t going to take on the teachings of Catholicism. 

The priest did say, and I told this to Victoria, that unlike marriage or first communion, anyone can perform a baptism.   (For the full transcript of my conversation with Father Steven see previous post, Let’s Have a Baptism)

Since then Victoria and I have had several conversations about making baptism our own thing.  We’re creating our own religion here:  A Judeo-Christian-Latina-Lesbiana religion of our own making.  A religion of peace and harmony and who cares what other people think.  That’s why I suggested that Tuffi be our priest.

Victoria said, like this was all new to her, “Well, we at least have to get someone Catholic.”

Ten years ago I read Anne Lamott’s book, Operating Instructions, but I still remember this line where Anne’s friend first learned that Adolf Hitler had a tormented childhood and the friend said, “I’ve had it with Hitler.”

I’ve had it with religion.

Previously: Let's Have a Baptism/Bris

Andrea Askowitz, author of My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy, is guest blogging for Jewcy, and she'll be here all week.  Lucky you!

Shortly before the beginning of seventh grade, when I entered the public school system for the first time after spending my earliest formative years at Nebraska’s only Jewish day school (student body: 37), my mother came to me with a warning. It wasn’t her intention to scare me, she explained, but she wanted to make sure I was prepared for some of the challenges that lay ahead.

“What challenges?” I asked. “What do you mean?” I wasn’t expecting the schoolwork to give me any trouble, and my grandmother had recently furnished me with several new back-to-school ensembles from the Limited that I was certain could at least partially smooth over my problem of not having any social skills.

My mother paused for a very long time before she spoke. “It’s possible that you may have to face some…anti-Semitism.”

Anti-Semitism. It wasn’t precisely clear to me what a Semite was, but I knew what it meant to be anti one. It meant you hated Jews and wanted them dead.

The existence of such a prejudice was hardly news; the bookshelves in my room groaned under the weight of solemn tales of the Holocaust and the pogroms, stories festooned with grim illustrations of terrified children laden with bundles, peering helplessly through pen and ink fence of barbed wire. My parents had their own stories: anti-Semitism was the reason my immigrant grandmother refused to let her children go swimming with the non-Jewish neighbors, why my father had been beaten up several times a week on his way home from junior high by roaming gangs of feral Gentile children.

But that was years ago.

“I’m not saying it will happen,” she continued, “but I want you to prepare for it if it does.”

As I had not yet learned that my mother’s general pessimism towards the human race was not always based in tangible reality, her warnings filled me with a consuming, atavistic sense of dread. When would the assault come, and in what form? Would I be shunned in the cafeteria or disinvited from birthday parties? Would I be physically attacked: trapped in lockers or forced to gather change from the floor as a gang of Esprit-clad Aryans mocked the parsimoniousness of my race? At the very least, I assumed I would be taunted verbally with cries of “kike” and “yid”; “heebie” and “hook-nose” and “Red Sea pedestrian” and other racial epithets I learned from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.

“You forgot sheeny,” said my mother.

“I thought that was an Irish person.”

“Nope. You’re a sheeny.”

As time passed, I would hear all those words and more. What my mother didn’t tell me is that they would mostly come from other Jews.

Everywhere, young Jews are eagerly, even gleefully appropriating the traditional iconography and language of anti-Semites faster than you can say “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” We howled with laughter at Borat, at the grotesque puppet in “The Running of the Jew” laying its “filthy Jew-egg” as Sacha Baron Cohen spewed der Sturmer-worthy invective in pidgin Hebrew. We read publications with names like Heeb and Jewcy, and cheerfully throw around terms and stereotypes that would have sent previous generations straight to the local ADL office. Recently, I was watching TV at home when I received a phone call from a co-religionist friend.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m at home, watching The Jewish Americans on PBS.”

“Yeah? What’s happening?”

“Oh, I guess this episode is on Leo Frank. But as far I as can see, the whole thing is mostly about how we’re ugly and everybody hates us.” We dissolved with laughter.

There are a number of possible reasons for this change in attitude. The age we are living in is a peculiar one, equal parts irony and genuine turmoil. Festering internecine and tribal hatreds have once again become a very real part of how the world operates; as a result, political correctness has died an unceremonious death, while multiculturalism is dying a somewhat more tortuous one. At the same time, overt intolerance has become nearly obsolete, to the point that one can perpetuate almost any form of prejudice with the implicit understanding that if the speaker is of a certain social class or education level, he or she cannot possibly be a bigot. On a strictly Jewish level, I think my generation has simply lost patience with our Hebrew school educations, with the constant focus on victimhood and hardship, and the sometimes reactionary politics of the Jewish establishment—with the powerful lobbies and their professional outrage, the shell-shocked parents and grandparents ever at the ready to pick up a phone or file a formal complaint the second a Jewish child is made to sing “Silent Night” or assigned a biology midterm on Yom Kippur (I speak from personal experience here.) There are better things to do with one’s time than to be constantly on guard against closet Nazis. Or maybe after 5000 years of the being on the wrong end of the world’s general shittiness, we’ve just stopped taking it so personally.

But to borrow a phrase from David Mamet in The Wicked Son, his provocative and occasionally infuriating book on the subject, “The world hates the Jews. The world has always and will continue to do so.”

Fine.

In this, my mother was right. All of our mothers were right. My generation, we American Jews in our 20’s and 30’s, may have missed having taunts and dirt clods thrown at our heads as we waited for the school bus, but you don’t have to look very far to find our people held in general contempt. In fact, don’t look hard at all—just look in the comments section of any major internet blog that so much as mentions the State of Israel, the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg, or boiled chicken.

So welcome to The Protocols, named of course for the famous (and forged) Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or as I like to think of it, the book that started the international craze, the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone of twentieth century anti-Semitism. Here, I’ll strive to answer the important questions—not so much “Why do they hate us?” but “So what if they hate us?” I’ll look at how Jews have, for better and for worse, internalized the tenets of anti-Semitism and turned them inside out, how Jews judge other Jews, and what it means to be a self-hating Jew (as opposed to a Jewish self-hater.) I’ll examine anti-Semites through history, anti-Semites in the news, and once every few weeks or so, anti-Semites we love. (And yes, I’m taking recommendations.)

My qualifications for this mighty task, taken on by everyone from Moses Maimonides, Mark Twain, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Adolf Hitler? None whatsoever; except I’ma writer, I’m a Jew, and I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of my life worrying about who doesn’t like me.

So, my fellow filthy Christ-killers, if you can stop counting your golden ingots and draining your neighbor’s kids of their blood long enough to actually read something, I hope you’ll join me. We may not win any hearts and minds, but in the words of the immortal G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle.

And after all, we’re supposed to be so smart.

For some reason, people are acting shocked about the news that John Hagee, the Three 'H's Of Zionism: Herzl, Hitler, and HageeTexas evangelical preacher who thinks buggery caused Hurricane Katrina, thinks Muslims are mindless, indiscriminate killers, thinks the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon, thinks Harry Potter fans are Satanists, and thinks the suffering of the Jews over the centuries is divine punishment, also happens to believe that Hitler was God's proxy on earth in His plan to return the Jews to Israel. But that's hardly news at all.

Yet on TV and all through the blogosphere, people are going nuts over the revelation that Hagee sees the Final Solution as God's work. Here's an example of our crazy political culture: It's a sure bet that Joe Lieberman will describe you as a latter day Moses and an "Eesh Elo Kim" if you organize millions of "pro-Israel" Christians to agitate for a war with Iran (so that Israel can be utterly annihilated in accord with God's wishes and you and your flock can build a stairway to heaven with Jewish bodies). Mention Hitler, however, and you might find yourself suddenly anathema. But since Hagee did mention Hitler in conjunction with his otherwise perfectly kosher, and indeed, Mosaic fantasies about finishing the job Hitler started, McCain—who was endorsed by the controversial pastor—finds himself in a pretty awkward position.

Of course, nobody thinks McCain shares Hagee's theology, though McCain apparently believes that it's legitimate to target his opponents with equivalent innuendo. Still, McCain didn't just wake up one day to find himself endorsed by Hagee; he deliberately courted Hagee's endorsement as part of a general strategy of shoring up his support among Evangelicals. Which could simply be chalked up to a poor vetting procedure by his staff, except that McCain specifically "admires" Hagee's foreign policy vision. It would certainly behoove McCain to clearly explain the differences between the belligerent policy towards Iran, Russia, and China that he wants to pursue, and the belligerent policy Hagee favors, but that would entail embracing nuance, which McCain has already made clear is tantamount to appeasement.

Moreover, McCain's support among religious and social conservatives goes back no more than a few months and is extremely fragile, compared to their now-dormant mistrust and loathing of McCain which were built up over years. What can McCain say about the surrogate he recruited as an ambassador to the Christian right who turned out to have endorsed the Final Solution? That Hagee is "an agent of intolerance"?

My prediction: McCain will impress us all with a bold stroke of mavericking that nobody could have anticipated.

It was from an obsessive Darwin-defender that I learned of the Anti-Defamation League's attack on the theatrical documentary Expelled, for "misappropriat[ing] the Holocaust." This guy is constantly emailing me. He warned that the ADL had just "issued a terse press release today condemning the equation of ‘Darwinism' with Nazism in Expelled. How can you call yourself a religious Jew and still believe in such Fundamentalist Protestant Christian nonsense like Intelligent Design?"

I thanked my email correspondent for a good laugh. The idea that, having defended Expelled's thesis concerning Hitler's intellectual debt to Charles Darwin, I would now feel chastised and repentant because of a statement from the ADL, an organization for which I have not a feather's weight of respect! This was rich stuff.

Just to be clear, however: Expelled doesn't equate Darwinism and Hitler. That basic point was also missed by Professor Sahotra Sarkar, who published a confused attack piece on me here on Jewcy. Sarkar attributed to me the view, "If you believe in the theory of evolution, you are an anti-Semite" -- something that, obviously, I would have to be a fool to write or believe.

Dealing primarily with the academic suppression of Darwin-doubting scientists on campuses around the country, Expelled only spends about 10 minutes on the Hitler-Darwin connection. But it draws upon a solid, mainstream body of scholarship by the chief Hitler biographers and others.

Undeterred, the ADL wailed that "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness."

Much the same view has been propounded elsewhere. Once again here at Jewcy, Jay Michaelson seemed to argue that all science is by definition value-neutral: "Last I checked, Hitler also made use of automobiles. Indeed, he based a lot of ideas on militarism and machines; does that mean technology is morally wrong? Should you turn off your computer right now?"

No, Jay, there are obvious differences between Darwinian theory and auto and computer technology. Most important, the latter make no claims to answering ultimate questions, like how life originated, from which ethical corollaries are naturally drawn.

Auto and computer technology are also proved reliable every day by our experience. But no one has ever reported seeing a species originate in the manner described in Darwin's Origin of Species - not now, not in the fossil record, not ever.

More interesting than these observations is the hypocrisy of the ADL's outburst: "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan."

It's funny how when the subject of conversation is Darwinism, then Hitler needed no one particular inspiration. But when the conversation shifts from Darwinism to - oh, I don't know - Christianity? Ah, then suddenly the genealogy of Nazism becomes eminently traceable.

One of the ADL's main fundraising technique has long been to scare Jews by demonizing Christianity. The group accordingly isn't shy about tracing the genealogy of the Holocaust back to the New Testament. In an essay on the 40^th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, for example, Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, director of interfaith affairs wrote:

"The anti-Judaism that begins in the New Testament was transformed through the admixture of political, economic and sociological prejudice into the anti-Semitism of modernity. This reached its ugly and inhuman nadir during World War II with Hitler's Final Solution for the Jewish people."

Blaming the earliest Christian writings for setting off a chain of influences resulting in the Holocaust evokes little outrage in the liberal Jewish community. Visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for instance, are greeted by a film, Anti-Semitism, purporting to uncover the "religious root of this phenomenon, the pervasive anti-Jewish teachings that evolved from overly literal readings and misreadings of New Testament texts."

Yet when Hitler successfully sold his ideology of hate to the German people in his bestselling tract Mein Kampf, he phrased his argument not in Christian terms but in biological, Darwinian ones.

Ignoring Hitler's evolutionary rhetoric, of course, some commentators brandish a famous quote from the same book -- "by defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." They don't realize that Hitler was referring not to the God of the Bible but to Nature and her iron laws, as his preceding sentence clearly indicates.

In a curious irony, the modern paperback edition of Mein Kampf, available in any Barnes & Noble, includes an Introduction by - guess who? None other than the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman. Did he, I wonder, even read the book?

Hitler Is Dead: Godwin's Law lives onThe anniversary of Hitler's death—just ten days after the anniversary of his birthday (which reminds me that he celebrated his final birthday in a bunker in Berlin)—is as good an occasion as any other for me to reflect once more about Godwin's Law. This one-off creation of mine, like the Energizer Bunny, keeps on going and going. If Godwin's Law had been a child, this year it would be old enough to vote.

I can't say I anticipated that Godwin's Law, which states that, "As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches 1," would last this long or that it would propagate into popular culture to the extent that it has. But I'm mostly gratified that it has done so. Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the Holocaust.

The genesis of the idea came from my reading Primo Levi's books in the 1980s. I had grown up with a pop-culture knowledge of World War II, and I had even seen many of the photos of the death camps, with their emaciated bodies stacked like cordwood and the haunted, piercing eyes of the skeletal inmates who survived. But Levi's writings brought the experience home to me—they helped me understand better what the experience must have been like for prisoners. In their accounts of the behavior of those who operated the camps and conducted the mass murders, I had a glimmer of insight into the psyches of the Nazis and their henchmen as well. Their consistent pattern of humiliating and dehumanizing Jews and other perceived enemies of the Nazi state—both before sending them to the camps and after they arrived—told me that, on some level, they recognized that what they were doing was a crime against humanity. Hence their psychological need to make their victims seem less human before exterminating them.

It was difficult, after attempting a greater psychological understanding of why the Holocaust happened and how it was conducted, to tolerate the glib comparisons I encountered on the Internet (Usenet in those days). My sense of moral outrage at this phenomenon found an outlet after I read an article in in the Whole Earth Review about memes—viral ideas—that inspired me to create a kind of counter-measure. And so I created Godwin's Law and began to repeat it in online forums whenever I encountered a silly comparison of someone or something to Hitler or to the Nazis. As the handy Wikipedia entry on Godwin's Law (crafted by someone else long before I ever came to work for the Wikimedia Foundation) points out, this was a deliberate experiment in memetics. In other words, I was trying to jumpstart Godwin's Law into becoming a self-propagating idea. By all accounts, I succeeded.

The Law turned out to be more successful at propagating itself than I could ever have predicted. Far more people have heard about "Godwin's Law" than have heard about me, although Wikipedia handily links us together nowadays (another link that predates my arrival at Wikipedia as a hobbyist editor and later as an employee). That's fine by me.

Still, I sometimes have some ambivalence about the Law, which is far beyond my control these days. Like most parents, I'm frequently startled by the unexpected turn my 18-year-old offspring takes. (I'm happy to say that my 15-year-old offspring—my daughter, Ariel Godwin—surprises me at least as often, although invariably in happier ways.) When I saw the photographs from Abu Ghraib, for example, I understood instantly the connection between the humiliations inflicted there and the ones the Nazis imposed upon death camp inmates—but I am the one person in the world least able to draw attention to that valid comparison.

Overall, though, I'm content that the Law has as much popcult traction as it does. My feeling is that "Never Again" loses its meaning if we don't regularly remind ourselves of the terrible inflection point marked in human culture by the Holocaust. Sure, there has been genocide before that point and genocide after it, but to see an advanced, highly civilized nation warp itself into something capable of creating such a horror—well, I think Nazi Germany does count as a first in that regard.

And to a great extent, our challenge as human beings who live in the period after that inflection point is that we no longer can be passive about history—we have a moral obligation to do what we can to prevent such events from ever happening again. Key to that obligation is remembering, which is what Godwin's Law is all about.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently took a trip to Brown University to give a speech about environmentalism. Or so he thought. Instead, he got a pie in the face from a couple of members of the "Revolutionary Communist Party, USA." And sure, Friedman seems like a victim here, but don't a mustache, neatly combed hair with a part, and violent clashes with Communists sound eerily familiar?

The Shocking Truth Revealed

The disturbing parallels don't stop there. President George W. Bush appointed a John Bolton to be US ambassador to the UN under the Führerprinzip, without congressional approval. Why? Because Bolton is one of the principle exponents and demagogues in the movement to break apart the liberal international order and replace it with an anarchic Darwinian international war of all against all, on the mystical quasi-religious belief that the inherent virtues of his Heimat will lead her to triumph over her internal and external enemies, and claim the mastery of the world she is due. Plus, sources in the know report that Bolton, a Yale man, is tied to Bush's mysterious Skull and Bones society, which everybody who's got the real news knows is where the Nazi movement began. Small wonder Bolton is a posterboy of the fringe über-nationalistic right wing. And that 'stache! Any guesses just what the poster will look like?

Bolton demands Lebensraum

Recently I discovered a relatively new food blog called Hezbollah Tofu. As the face of a self-described "Bourdain Veganizing Collective," the site got me thinking a bit more deeply about chef, author, and travel show host Anthony Bourdain. In the past, I'd written him off as annoying but relatively harmless: Narcissistic, yes, and prone to angrily shit-talking those who disagree with him (and sometimes even those who don't), but generally not someone to worry about.

I took his anti-vegetarian and vegan rantings with a big grain of kosher salt. In his book Kitchen Confidential, he writes:

"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn...Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold."

Sticks and stones, right? Wrong. Though it had never occurred to me before, today everything became kristallnacht clear: Who else stereotyped minority groups as "persistent irritants" and "the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit"? Who else saw minority groups as "an affront to all he stood for" and typecast them as physically weaker? Hint:

Toasting The End of The Vegans

Newsflash: Hitler is dead. In fact, today is the 63rd anniversary of his death. Alas, since World War II, Jewish discourse on absolutely every single matter of import to Jews has been crippled by the rhetoric of comparing perceived enemies and threats to Hitler. Whether it's intermarriage, Israel, matrilineal succession (i.e. "who is a Jew?"), whether Jews should retain their separateness, how America should deal with Iran, or whether we should care about Jeremiah Wright's sermons, again and again and again, Nazism and Hitlerism are invoked on every side.

In 1990, a guy named Mike Godwin noticed a similar problem in the online community Usenet. He formulated what's now known as Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." In the intervening eighteen years, Godwin's Law spread far beyond Usenet to became a bona fide Internet meme. It's now shorthand for any conversation riddled with useless comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis.

It's fine to be sensitive to the historical lessons of WWII, but the tragedy of Godwin's Law is that the Hitler fetish doesn't improve our understanding or insight into any problem. Instead, it diminishes our ability to discuss it. The preoccupation with Hitler and WWII prevents us from honestly considering the opposing side of any debate. We dehumanize our opponent as complicit in genocide, and isn't that very dehumanization and strawmanning and simplifying of people's motives...sort of like Hitler?

In honor of the anniversary of Hitler's death, we looked for some unexpected personalities to Godwin. It's surprisingly easy! More are on their way, so check back often.

Hitlery Rodham Clinton propels herself to power through bogus, distorted, simplified economic pandering targeted at the lowest common denominator of an electorate.

John Sidney Hitler McCain sees politics as a break in between wars and seeks to impose his country's values on the rest of world.

Santa Claus, Enemy of the Jews has at least half of the world’s children under his thumb and saturates the media with his own likeness, ideas, and philosophy.

Baraq Hitler-ssein Osama leads a frightening cult of personality.

Everyone at Columbia is accusing everyone else of Hitlerian tactics in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary.

Anthony Bourdain stereotypes minority groups as "persistent irritants" and "the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit."

Creator of Godwin's law, Mike Godwin, weighs in. 

Some mania is propelling millions of Americans to vote for a man who offers them nothing but cheap, soothing platitudes about some coming golden age of national unity while scapegoating unnamed foreigners and greedy rapacious capitalists for their troubles, and building up a frightening cult of personality around himself. Most of his friends seem to be anti-Semites, and those that aren't Jew-haters seek the violent overthrow of the government and the imposition of a new totalitarian order based on the leadership of some "Worker's Party."

We've seen this movie before, haven't we? Domestic terrorists attempt to set off a revolution in their country's "Second City"; are foiled but not vanquished; and bide their time. People, wake up. First they'll come for the capital gains --- and if you don't speak out because you're not a capital gain, who will speak out for you?

You know who else was for unity?

Last week, Fareed Zakaria pointed out that John McCain's recent major foreign policy address "contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed. In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries...It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war."

Well sure, but Zakaria doesn't have the courage to go where the facts should lead him. In McCain's own lifetime, there was another world leader who saw politics as a break in between wars and sought to impose his country's values on the rest of world. That leader saw confrontation with Russia, specifically, as his world-historical destiny, and embarked on an unprovoked attack on the Great Bear that led not only to his own downfall, but to the utter destruction of his state and its political order. That leader's name? Do I even need to spell it out?

Also would have thrown Russia out of the G8

Photographic evidence: Santa gives the Nazi saluteI know it’s almost May, and Christmas isn’t exactly around the corner, but I’d just like to go on the record and say how fed up I am with Santa Claus. I saw someone yesterday in a Santa suit (I didn’t ask why) and it got me thinking about how completely perilous Santa is and always has been.

When you think about it, Santa’s a lot like Hitler.

• He lives far away and so doesn't really seem like a direct threat.
• He keeps slaves of a lower caste to do the labor he needs.
  
• He steals into people’s houses late at night when they're least expecting it.
  
• He discriminates, makes lists (and apparently checks them twice), and has some eerie way of knowing who’s naughty (Jews, ahem) and nice (informers, possibly?)
• He wears a strange uniform.
  
• He has at least half of the world’s children under his thumb.
  
• Oh yeah, and he saturates the media with his own likeness, ideas, and philosophy.

Does anyone else think this might be dangerous? And don’t give me any crap about him having anything to do with Christmas—show me where it says Santa in the New Testament. Show me the nonsense about cookies and milk and Rudolf. Give me chapter and verse and we can chat. Until then, keep Santa away. Santa is an anagram of Satan, and as far as I’m concerned, Santa-themed sweaters might as well have big black swastikas on them. Mark my words: One of these days "Heil Santa" will catch on as a holiday greeting. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Hillary Clinton has come out in favor of a summertime gas tax holiday, because, she claims, she wants to lend a hand to consumers hard hit by rising fuel costs. What's more, she's using the proposal to bash her Democratic primary opponent as an out of touch elitist. One could criticize the plan by pointing out that it will save consumers maybe $30 --- or, if the supply of gas is inelastic (it is), the cut won't save consumers anything. Or one could point out that a candidate ostensibly in favor of curbing greenhouse gas emissions has no business promoting a government-backed splurge in fossil fuel consumption. Or one could point out that Clinton's proposed 18.4 cent/gallon cut in gas prices is more than offset by the 35 cent hike in gas prices her cap-and-trade plan will entail.

But really, that's missing the big picture. What other monomaniacal politician propelled himself to power through bogus, distorted, simplified economic pandering targeted at the lowest common denominator of an electorate? What other politician railed against plutocrats and fed voters' suspicions that they were victims of an elaborate conspiracy of financiers? What other politician attacked his political opponents as out of touch elitists who were vaguely but suspiciously alien to his country and its culture, and was friends with Leni Riefenstahl?

I think you know the answer:

Didn't like international corporations, either

Happy Jewish Family?: could be!Think it's cute to call someone a "Member of the Tribe"? Sure, it turns "otherness" into exclusivity, but it's also a misnomer. In fact, it can be downright destructive. Case in point: When I worked as a docent at the Museum of Tolerance (MOT again, OMG!), I repeatedly found myself arguing whether or not Jews are a "bloodline" with tourists from Arkansas, Utah, Austria...you name it.

"Actually," I'd interject, as yet another vocal visitor explained to his or her compatriots that Jews were a race, "Judaism is not a race. It's a religion. You know, like Christianity, or Sikhism."

And without fail, I'd find myself in the midst of a totally futile debate about race, bloodlines, and tribes.

"It's a bloodline," my interlocutor would almost always declare, not hearing a word I'd said. "They're a tribe. A race."

Explaining the differences between race, ethnicity, religion, and culture was lost on these particular visitors. What wasn't lost on me, though, was the problematic nature of a seemingly harmless nickname. The Tribe. It made my skin crawl, because it misrepresented us so enormously.

The concept of a Jewish bloodline was actually exploited and manipulated by the Nazis, who went to great lengths to define Jews first and foremost as an impure, genetically inferior race.

The truth, as Douglas Rushkoff explained it, is that "Jews are not a tribe but an amalgamation of tribes around a single premise: that human beings have a role." Get it? Jews originated as a bunch of people from different tribes who came together around a set of ideas. It's why people can convert to Judaism, but can't convert to "Asianness" or "Blackness." I can go from Jewish to Sikh, like my pal Gurudhan Khalsa did, but I'll never be Latina.

So the next time someone asks you if you're a "MOT," tell them "No, but I'm Jewish."

Time magazine ranked General Petraeus fourth runner up for the publication’s 2007 “Person of The Year”. Given the General’s clear insight into media politics, one suspects he was probably surprised to find out he was being considered at all. Given his humble resolve, it’s almost certain he would have found the ridiculous title an embarrassment. After all, Time has bestowed the honor (that they’re quick to insist isn’t an honor) upon both Adolf Hitler (from the January 1939 edition: “He lifted the nation from post-War defeatism. Under the swastika Germany was unified. His was no ordinary dictatorship, but rather one of great energy and magnificent planning.”) And Joseph Stalin (from the January 1940 edition: “Despite the disastrous purges, despite the low opinion that J. Stalin & Co. held of human life, Soviet Russia had definitely gained some measure of respect for its apparent righteousness in foreign affairs.”)

Looking over those quotes, I think it’s safe to say that while the title isn’t explicitly an honor, the non-honoree is treated with no small measure of reverence. Which we know General Petraeus has yet to command from the MSM.

Given that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was much more Time-friendly, it’s worth reviewing the accomplishments of a man who does deserve an honor that is, in fact, an honor.

By the time David Petraeus took over command of the Iraq War, columnists and politicians had long exhausted the blunder pages of their thesauri. Lawlessness was the order of the day. Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was years into their campaign of exploiting Sunni-Shia strife. They’d managed to provoke an apparent state of multiple civil wars, the dousing of which seemed obscenely out of the U.S. military’s reach.

Petraeus knew that what looked like civil war was, in fact, AQI’s cynically devised plan to foment sectarian bloodshed. Al Qaeda car bombings and mosque bombings were carried out in hopes of retaliation that would, of their own momentum, go on to tear the country apart. Instead of taking sides in a fictitious civil war, he employed a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy as unprecedented as it was brave. U.S. soldiers would no longer stay barricaded in heavily fortified bases. Instead they operated out of regional outposts in the heart of hot spots, and shared patrol duties with Iraqis. Additionally, forces leaned on AQI hideouts simultaneously so that insurgents couldn’t simply pack up and check in at the next jihad flophouse. These strategic measures, not the simple up-tick in troops, lay at the heart of the surge. Just as the media (and many lawmakers) failed to grasp that, they now fail to see that Iraqi political progress, found lacking when measured from the top-down, is well underway if measured from the bottom-up. Local leaders, both Sunni and Shia, are renouncing the sectarian violence that once gripped their country. Sunni’s are turning against AQI and Shia against Mahdi Army type militiamen in order to bring stability to Iraq.

Without General Petraeus, we’d be closing this year with a catastrophic defeat of U.S. forces in the heart of Mesopotamia. Instead we’ve driven civil society’s worst enemy from their most strategically valuable arena. The long-term effect of a loss in Iraq would have meant untold damage: to U.S. military prowess, to American soft power, to the cause of liberation in the Muslim world. A few days ago, Andrew Sullivan, still blind to coalition progress in Iraq, wrote that the U.S. needs a “humble foreign policy” going forward. Indeed, we would have one without Davis Petraeus. Instead, we now have this.

Yesterday on the Fox News channel Charles Krauthammer predicted General David Petraeus will someday be elected president of the United States. Hey, it’s not “Person of the Year,” but it doesn’t suck either.

For my generation of writers, Norman Mailer, who died on November 10th of renal failure, was the ultimate father figure. We measured ourselves against the sweep of his brilliance—for it must be conceded that even his lesser books had the sweep of brilliance—our whole adult lives. He was the giant who dared giant leaps and, more than occasionally, giant pratfalls. Thus my drive to his brick house on the very end of Cape Cod in Provincetown, Mass. some months ago had the excitement and dread of a pilgrimage. Beside me on the passenger seat, the author photo on his last novel, The Castle in the Forest, drilled into me with a father’s intensity—equally admonishing and exhortatory—until I finally had to cover it with my hat. But I took my hat off when I entered his house and started asking questions.

Whatever else that can be said about it, this new book is written with the vigor of someone half your age.

Good to hear. But every time I hear compliments, my feet start doing this [twitching].

Not the shy, retiring type: A first edition of Advertisements for Myself You want to run away?

I’ve never learned to take a compliment graciously.

How come?

Damned if I know. My father, an elegant man, always took compliments very well. But I, being rough hewn, loved messing his hair. Maybe I defined myself in opposition to him.

In this book, the relationship between young Adi (Adolph) and his father is very fraught—more moving than I expected it to be.

I’ve been thinking about how many of my books have that recurring theme. My relationship with my father was very interesting. Not hostile, but never near. I couldn’t reach him. He was an exceptionally complex man. He was very proud of me after “The Naked and the Dead,” which he must have read ten times.

Did he “get” it?

Oh yeah.

So you were able to communicate on that very deep level.

Yeah, he didn’t go in for long speeches, but he would look at me and say,“This is good.”

Was it from him that you got your grit?

My father was a very bold man in his quiet way. And my mother was a remarkable woman—not only strong but also loving.

You demonize Hitler here, quite literally—the demon narrator is there at the conception. Aren’t you thereby letting mankind off the hook?

It seems to me there have been two exceptional births in human history: Jesus Christ and Adolph Hitler. Hitler is the devil’s answer to Jesus Christ.

Oedipal shmedipal, as long as he loves his mother: Mailer's Hilter had some Freudian issuesYou like making large statements, don’t you?

Drives wives crazy.

I can only imagine.

I make them for the sheer joy of making them.

When you read younger novelists today, are you impatient that they don’t seek to go larger?

I don’t read them. Which I think is one of the reasons they’re not particularly in love with me.

Whom do you read for pleasure?

I find I can’t read good novels anymore—not when I’m working—because they’re too disruptive. I get excited by them, and go off in all sorts of directions. How would I do if I were writing it? And I get off my own work. I’m immensely single-minded, I’d even say dull, about sticking to my own work. For the last ten years I’ve always felt I’ve got one book left, one book left, one book left.

If there’s still one left after this one, what will it be?

A sequel to this one about Hitler. In this last, after all, I only take him to age 16. I think there’s a little more to him …

Are you impatient with some of your contemporaries for not contending with the larger questions?

Look, for better or for worse, I have that kind of mind. They have [theirs]. I used to be very competitive. By now I’m sick of it, in the sense that it has no meaning. Either one of us will last, or ten of us, who knows. History can wipe all of us out.

I wasn’t expecting to hear such mellowness from you.

It’s not mellowness, it’s shared amusement. After competing with someone who used to be a rival, in the end we have a shared conversation. I respect Roth, I respect Updike, DeLillo, Vonnegut, I could name ten of them, they’re all good writers.

One book left?: The pugilist in his last daysSalinger?

Salinger I’m pissed off at, because he had such a glimpse into America when he was young, and he didn’t use it.

Any theory as to why he went silent?

No theory worth airing.

At your age [of 83], are you more prudent not to air a theory if it’s half-baked?

I’ve gone off half-cocked so many times in my youth that yes, now I’m a little older…

So you’re still actively growing?

Better growth than decrepitude.

It’s marvelous that you have this capacity…

Well listen, we’ll see. But I can guarantee you one thing: At the moment there are 20 writers, male and female, who feel that they are the best living American writer. And I of course am one of them. But that’s as far as I’ll go.

You deal in opposites a lot, don’t you? You like the way the world is balanced.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

So how do you finally measure up on the wisdom scale?

I’d probably give myself a very good mark.

Care to offer a numerical grade?

[Chuckling] No. That would not be wise.

As a man, are you ever intimidated?

Not anymore. The best thing about old age is that you’re no longer intimidated by anybody. There’s a real cool that comes in with old age.

* * *

NEXT: Read Shvitz post From White Negro to Jewish Hipster: Jews Still Acting Black in 2007, by Eric Goldstein

ALSO IN JEWCY:

Michael Weiss wrote an obituary for Mailer, Abe Greenwald compared him to Bono, and Stefan Beck called him an example of the free pass we give literary rock stars of a certain age.

[This article originally appeared in The Washington Post.]

HITLER FANCIED JEW TUNES

THE NEWS:

Hitler had a secret music collection of Russian and Jewish artists. [Guardian Unlimited]

THE CHATTER:

German magazine Der Spiegel reported hundreds of gramophone records were discovered in the attic of a former Soviet intelligence officer, Lev Besymenski. Professor Wolfgang Wippermann, a historian at the Berlin University of the Arts, said, “I'm not surprised that he would, secretly of course, listen to those composers. Hitler loved classical music and he could best relax with his music.” [ABC News]

The Forward’s Bintel bloggers ask if Hitler dug Jewish music. [The Jewish Daily Forward]

 

REMEMBERING A JEWISH-BORN CATHOLIC CARDINAL

THE NEWS:

Jean-Marie Lustiger, a Jewish-born convert to Catholicism who became a top Vatican figure, died this week. [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

As he lay in a Paris hospice, Cardinal Lustiger reached out to his longtime friend Rabbi Israel Singer.

The Jewish-born Catholic official, who served for decades as a conduit between the Vatican and the Jewish community, called Singer, a former senior official of the World Jewish Congress and a major player in the effort to build Catholic-Jewish ties. Singer flew to Paris and the two met several times before Lustiger succumbed to cancer on Sunday. He was 80.

"He was completely conscious and aware," said Singer, who called Lustiger by his Hebrew name. "Some of the conversations were 25 years old. They were very moving."

THE CHATTER:

Speaking of Jews pining for communion, Jewcy writer Aaron Hamburger explores his own love affair with Catholicism. [Jewcy]

If a Jew can become a top Vatican figure, then why can’t Bugs Bunny be Jewish? David Kaufmann, of the Forward, asks this pivotal question. [The Jewish Daily Forward]

 

JEWS MUST ACT LIKE LEO AND AL GORE

THE NEWS:

Rabbi Steve Gutow, the executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, writes in a JTA op-ed that energy conservation and reducing greenhouse emissions are an obligation Jews have to the world. Gutgow writes, “The Jewish community is right to make Israel's safety and thwarting Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons top priorities, but energy independence and global warming are equally important in the long run and deserving of the same level of attention.” [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

THE CHATTER:

Jews should not only be concerned with passing on a healthy planet to their children and grandchildren but also the potential impacts of global warming on the nation of Israel: “A national assessment conducted by the Israeli government in 2000 raised the specter of Mediterranean Sea level increases in the narrow coastal strip where 60 percent of Israel’s population lives, changes in rainfall patterns that could disrupt agricultural production and major drops in water supplies.” [The Jewish Week]

Could the fight against global warming finally stop the Darfur genocide, which has been called the world’s first “climate-change conflict”? [Canadian Coalition]

Or, in the wonderful spirit of bigotry and lunacy, we could all just listen to CNN cable TV and syndicated radio host Glenn Beck. [Grist]

Beck said Gore using "same tactic" in fight against global warming as Hitler did against Jews. [Media Matters]

Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal. Back in the 1930s, the goal was get rid of all of the Jews and have one global government.

You got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler's plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore's enemy, the U.N.'s enemy: global warming.

 

BAT MITZVAH GIRL DOES THE UNTHINKABLE

THE NEWS:

Samantha Resnick donated $100,000 worth of Bat Mitzvah money to the Jewish National Fund to build a new playground in Sapir Park in the Arava Valley of Israel. [The Jerusalem Post]

THE CHATTER:

JBloggers say she’s a Bat Mitzvah girl who gets it. [Israel Forum]

Google’s gone screwy: “crazy russian extreme street climbing video” was one of the links that showed up when I searched “Samantha Resnick.” Check it out. Warning: it’s cool but will almost certainly give you a headache. [Google Video]

ALSO IN JEWISH NEWS:

In a groundbreaking move to recognize the experiences of transgender Jews, the Reform movement has published several prayers for sanctifying the sex-change process. [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

Isaac Larian, an Iranian Jewish immigrant, set out in 2000 to create an alternative to Barbie. Seven years later, his line of Bratz dolls is a billion-dollar industry with a new motion picture in theaters. [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

Pearl HarborWhen I'm not doing comedy, I make my living as an SAT tutor. A damned good one, if I may say so. Every time I hear about some dumb gimmick for studying the SAT (study on your cellphone, "yo momma" jokes, the SAT shower curtain), I think "Well, that'll work for vocabulary." (It's not, however, likely to teach you to deal with fractional exponents, or any serious comparison of long reading passages).

When Flocabulary came out with a hip-hop vocabulary book and CD, I shrugged. That could work. But when the same people came out with Flocabulary: The Hip-Hop Approach to U.S. History, I bought the book and CD. So I could laugh. Blog and laugh.

I loaded the tracks on my iPod ... and proceeded to have a religious experience. Pedagogically religious, anyway. The music didn't suck. In fact, the first song, about the founding of America, began like this:

Black Male Voice Portraying a European, and Rapping in the Most Drippingly Sarcastic Rapper Voice I Have Ever Heard: Wow, I just discovered America!

Black Male Voice Portraying an Angry Native American Speaking as Though to a Small, Racist Child: You didn't discover it. We were already here.

The song goes on to talk about migration over the Bering Strait, the five "civilized" tribes, and the fact that some Native Americans had slaves ("Indians weren't living on some heaven on earth tip"), and to comment, "Isn't that cheap? They call my Jeep a Jeep Cherokee -- what if they called my Jeep a Jeep Jew?"

In the course of this album, Harriet Tubman gets a Lil Kim-like solo ("Reward for my capture? 40 G's"), Frederick Douglass gets to sound like the incredible badass he was, Carnegie (in "Big Ballin' in the Gilded Age") raps about Social Darwinism while Rockefeller points out that Jay-Z named his company "after me," and Sacajawea guides Lewis and Clark through the Rockies "like Mapquest." Lincoln (whose Emancipation Proclamation, of course, failed to free any actual slaves) is portrayed with a dorky, squeaky white guy voice -- but FDR gets a booming, dignified white guy voice. Perhaps my favorite line is when Sally Hemings first attracts Thomas Jefferson:

She's dressed in yellow. She says "Hello,

You probably noticed me in the fields of Monticello."

Below is a sound clip (a couple verses, so as to say within fair use) from a song called "Would You Drop It?", which presents, I think, a not-bad-at-all explanation of World War II up to Truman's decision to drop the bomb. I challenge anyone to better explain fascism and its appeal to Germans, isolationism, the Great Depression, and Europe's falling to the Germans until Pearl Harbor galvanized us "like 9/11" -- in one minute, in rhyme.

All these tracks are on iTunes (search "Flocabulary"). If I could buy them for every teenager in America, I would.

"Would You Drop It"? (clip)

Leni: A Freakish Force Of NatureWaiting 2.5 hours in line at the RMV has its advantages. One of these is that it forces me to get through an entire New Yorker and learn more about Phil Collins or Leni Riefenstahl than I'd ever want to know. Riefenstahl is more alluring in a historical context, but the ambiguity of Collins' sexuality makes him intirguing in an Elton John I was married before so I'm most likely bi way.

So what's the big hoopla about Steven Bach's new 400-page expose of Leni? For one, its subject. Without a doubt, Riefenstahl is one of the most compelling figures of the 20th Century. Her influential dalliances with Hitler, fascism, film, art, and Aryan perfection played against a relatively humble upbringing and partly Jewish genetic pool (her mother was half Jewish) allow for a more serious psychological exploration of Riefenstahl and her motives.

Either way, Leni is presented as calculated, cold, and manipulative. But her ambition, misguided as it was and unsurpassed even by the aggressive male circles she found herself in, inspires. Above all, Bach envisions Leni as the ultimate survivor. Even in the several decades following WWII, Riefenstahl claimed that she knew nothing of Jewish atrocities during the Holocaust. She was never an apologist. And she had, as it so happened, a whole lot of time on her side.

Continue reading...

Leni on the Slopes: Riefenstahl the Aryan pin-upIn Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay (dig the new website!) on the life and legacy of Leni Riefenstahl, we come across the following factoid, which has the virtue of being pathetic enough to be true:

In the course of a dark century, Riefenstahl seems to have suffered at least one spasm of something like doubt, and the moment was captured in a photograph. When Hitler invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, she mustered some of her most seasoned technicians into a combat-film unit. They left for the front about a week later, reporting for duty “on Hitler’s orders” to the small, predominantly Jewish town of Końskie. Waking under fire the next morning, September 12th—the day the Reich’s news bureau promised a solution to “the Jewish problem in Poland”—Riefenstahl was on hand to witness an improvised beginning to the exterminations. Claiming that Polish partisans had killed a German officer and four soldiers, the occupying troops herded a Jewish burial detail to the main square. When the soldiers guarding the gravediggers began to kick and club them into the pit, Riefenstahl tried to intervene, she said, but they turned on her with cries of “Get rid of the bitch.” Bach writes, “An amateur photographer captured her distraught expression.”

The subsequent massacre at Kon´skie left a toll of thirty victims. An eyewitness testified that Riefenstahl had a “sobbing fit” when she saw the Wehrmacht open fire on civilians, and she later claimed to have been “so upset” by this experience that she asked for permission to abandon her assignment and return to Berlin. In reality, however, she hitched a ride on a military plane to Danzig, where she lunched with Hitler (he expressed “shock and anger” at the story, she said) and accepted his invitation to hear the victory speech in which he blamed England for the war.

So the best propagandist for the Third Reich evidently didn't think what she was selling would ever be purchased by men with guns. One admires Hitler's feigned reaction upon hearing of a massacre that must have had him salivating at the prospect of more.

In the original version of his beautiful memorial to W.B. Yeat, Auden wrote:

Time, that is intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet. 

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Riefenstahl had some talent as a documentarian, but can it really be said that she should be pardoned by the moral judgment of posterity as she was by the tribunal of Nuremberg, whose punitive scope was much narrower?

Someone discovered that there is a street in Brooklyn's very Jewish Manhattan Beach area that is indirectly named after Hitler, well according to the Jewish Blogmeister anyways.

Old-School Dead Guys All Look The SameIt was recently discovered that Austin Corbin, a 19th century Brooklyn Land Developer and one time head of the Long Island Railroad was also an outspoken anti-Semite, and president of the American Society of the Suppression of Jews. There is now a movement to rectify this situation.

This movement is also known as paranoid people with too much time on their hands. Besides, Corbin's Sun sign was in Cancer. Of course the guy had issues.

Boo-ya kasha and good on Slate for hiring Ron Rosenbaum to write the biweekly culture column that made the New York Observer compulsively readable every other week for so many years. Call him the Edgy Enthusiast or the Spectator, Ron doesn't disappoint with his first submission on Norman Mailer and what, exactly, made Hitler such a rampaging psychopath. Burnt pot roast? Mommy issues? Not quite. Like Gandhi, "Uncle Alf" had a highly questionable relationship with his niece, Geli Raubal. Unlike Gandhi, Hitler might have killed his.

Is this fertile ground for Stormin' Norman to be tilling? Nein. For one thing, even if Hitler did have incestuous relations with his kin before offing her, such does not a gateway to genocide become.

There's also something faintly meretricious about unlocking the unified field theory of world-historical tyranny. Pedants who obsess about psychological "root causes," and isolate a single root like one molested and murdered niece, deserve to hear the one funny joke in Sarah Silverman's repertoire, about her own niece who comes home from school one day and says that 60 million* Jews died in the Holocaust. Historical accuracy is important, Auntie Sarah replies, because 60 million would have been unforgivable.

There's a reason, I think, we prefer Silence of the Lambs to Hannibal Rising, and it has more to do with mythic appeal of the incomprehensible than it does with Thomas Harris' declining prose standards. Jurassic Park was a snooze when that lab technician removed the integument of yoke from the hatchling velociraptor's eyes, and did we really care about the amberized mosquito DNA-donor? No, we sat up when that bad boy's older brothers started opening doors in the kitchen, hunting for the kids.

Likewise, Hitler needs to be whole-grown and capable of realizing his full potential for evil before we're ready to give him the time of day. One victim won't do; six million will. It's the hypothetical power he still wields over us, who might have lived in Europe in the thirties, that holds and terrifies.

Don DeLillo parodied the pathological obsession with the pathology of the Fuhrer with the Hitler Studies Department in White Noise. But however silly reductionism like this may be, it ought not to lead to its inverse: seeing the enormity of the criminal as grounds to keep our minds shut as to how he came to be, if only raw, unexamined biography is our resource. Stay away from Freud and we'll be okay:

So, here are the temptations: Will Mailer be tempted by the murder narrative or the intimations of paraphilic sexuality, or both?

Will he attribute Hitler's moral deformity to his sexual proclivities? Or will they be the promptings of a devil as such promptings are in Castle in the Forest? Will he underpin it with some Maileresque version of the Freudian interpretation of Dr. Norbert Bromberg, an NYU professor who, in the first book-length "analysis" of Hitler by a credentialed psychoanalyst, Hitler's Psychopathology, attempts to link Hitler's exterminationist anti-Semitism to his relationship with Geli Raubal and the discredited "Jewish blood" legend (the rumor that Hitler was obsessed with the possibility there was a Jew in his family tree)?

Here's Dr. Bromberg's strained link:

In 1928, "Hitler was deeply and more openly involved with ... his niece Geli. About the same time he was preparing a work which became known as Hitler's Secret Book published for the first time thirty-three years later. In this book he associated his hatred of Jews with ideas about blood and race for the first time. His sexual interest in his niece must have inevitably stirred in Hitler thoughts of incest and fears of harming her and possible progeny by what he believed might result: the corruption of her blood [by the putative "Jewish blood" Hitler believed he'd been tainted with—in Bromberg's view]. All these ideas and wishes he projected onto the Jews ..."

Kipling's phrase "thinking with the blood" was actually coined to account for his loathing of the "Hun" in World War I. But it also gets at the studied and codified race hatred of Nazism that was underwritten by 19th century German pseudo-scientists like Max Nordau. (Nordau, ironically, was a Jew who went on to become a vigorous Zionist after creating his theory of "decadentism." No luftmenschen, highbrows or queers.)

"Thinking with the cum" is what the repressed-loser explanation of Hitler amount to.

*Originally stated this was 600 million. Thanks for the correction below.